Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present..

I didn't write anything until I was well over 30..

I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence..

Born in Jerusalem, Wadie Said went from being a dragoman to a salesman in the United States and thence to a hugely successful businessman in Egypt..

You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not - life has been liv….

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history..

Wars are fought by children. Conceived by their mad demonic elders, and fought by boys..

We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve….

People die, but money never does..

Grief-stricken. Stricken is right; it is as though you had been felled. Knocked to the ground; pitched out of life and into something else..

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters;….

But who knows their own child? You know bits - certain predictable reactions, a handful of familiar qualities. The rest is impenetrable. And quite ri….

Giving presents is one of the most possessive things we do, did you realize that? It's the way we keep a hold on other people. Plant ourselves in the….

We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people..

I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walke….